to get involved in any sort ofmotorsport,” Mark explains.“The city’s kind of isolated.So, once I became old enoughto drive, the twisty mountainroads were my racetrack, andI loved to drive. I loved thefeeling of making a car move.”Fast forward several yearsand Mark got married, ultimatelymoving his life two hoursnorthwest to the bustling cityof Sacramento. “That’s whenI attended a motorsport expo inSacramento,” he says of a fatefulday back in 1992. “There wasa booth for SCCA, and I realizedthat I didn’t need a speciallicense or anything like that toactually go and compete. At thetime, I had a first generationall-wheel-drive Eagle Talon turbo,so I found out about autocrossand went to an event at Crow’sLanding. And the rest is history.”Mark has competed in avariety of vehicles through theyears, but early on, his mainrides were that of the Talonand a Mitsubishi Galant VR- 4.Back then, his autocrossingsuccess was scant – but thosestruggles ultimately led to hisfirst ah-ha moment. “In theearly ’90s, fresh off of the heelsof Audi’s dominance in SCCATrans Am, the classing philosophywas to bury all-wheel-drive carsbecause they had a theoreticaladvantage,” he recalls. “Well, myEagle Talon was all-wheel driveand it was classed in B Stock,the same class as a 944 S2, a944 Turbo S, and an MR2 Turbo.All of those cars have more tire,more wheel, better suspension,more power. Meanwhile, I’m on6.5-inch wheels, have 195hp, andno camber. I didn’t know it at thetime, but I was in the wrong car.”“Setup was easy for thatcar,” Mark says of 2016 turboCamaro he piloted to the D StreetNational Championship in 2017.

“Nobody made a set of shocksanything that I’d driven. That’swhen the light bulb went off.”Cars came and went(incidentally, Mark buysand sells cars for a living, sohim switching vehicles isn’tsurprising), but it was the 2013

Ford Focus ST where things
truly clicked. While Mark talks
about competing in the right car,
it’s extraordinarily notable that
his win in 2017 came in a car
that, by all rights, was wrong.

Around this time, Mark’s
brother-in-law decided to try
autocrossing a 1989 Mercury
Tracer. “He ordered up some
tires for the stock wheels and
I co-drove with him at an event
at Candlestick,” Mark says. “I not
only won H Stock, I ran a time
that would have won E Stock,
and I indexed 15th out of roughly

250 people. I mean, this was
revolutionary for me because
I’d never been competitive in

HO W TO WIN

(RIGHT) Mark won G Street at the
Solo National Championships on his
first try in 2014, and then backed that
up in 2015. (MIDDLE RIGHT) In 2017,
Mark competed at the Solo Nationals
in an unlikely D Street contender,
winning once more. (BELOW) Mark’s
secret to success? He likes to keep
modifications to a minimum, with
the largest at-event adjustment often
being a tweak to the swaybar.

“ This was revolutionary
to me because I’d never
been competitive in
anything that I’d driven”
MARK SCROGGS